The History Of SOUND7

Let me share with you a story of a young boy, lying on his parents living floor absolutely mesmerised by the magical sounds being pumped into his ears by his Fathers Philips personal cassette player…

Those were the sounds of the synth breakdown in Invisible Touch by Genesis. These magical tones, unlike any instrument I had heard before.

I was instantly hooked on those magical sounds and one day vowed to work, own or in someway be around whatever devices were making these magical sounds.

Many moments of my childhood years were spent recording my own voice and other sounds into the onboard microphone of a Hitachi trk-7800e - a far cry from the synths of Genesis.

Later in life, studying IT & Music Technology at college, owning my own synths was still an unobtainable pipe dream. Music Technology back then meant prodding notes on a Casio keyboard to little practical use. Phil Collins on the synths I wasn’t.

All that changed in 2003, when Novation launched their V-Station software plugin in VSTi format. Billed as a true 1:1 software clone of their hardware K-Station it could even load K-Station patches. Say what? I can have a ‘real’ synthesiser run inside my computer at home??? 

After many weekends jobbing for my grandparents I managed to save enough money to buy my own copy of this mad new VSTi Synth.

2 years later in 2005 I finished my first sound bank. Inspired by what was then the “golden years” of Trance music - I emulated many of the sounds I loved from my favourite songs such as;

4-Strings - Take me away.

PPK - Resurrection

Scott Mac - Damager 02

I also created entirely new sounds, put together like a mad scientist tweaking dials and switches for terminology I was still beginning to understand.

That first sound pack was released for free at the KVR forums and the long defunct Trance.nu forums to a lot of praise at the time.

The rest as they say.. is history. 

I still don’t own the synths of Genesis - but that’s okay, because with todays breadth of synth recreations, musical technology and software innovation nobody needs to. 

.. So then upon hearing about the free re-release V-Station Synth Plugin from Novation I was instantly thrown back to those early days of my musical journey.

With that, (and after many weeks of trying to locate it) I present to you the first sound bank that started it all. In its original unedited form. 

At the time of creation in 2005, my monitoring situation consisted of a pair of hi-fi speakers in an untreated bedroom with a wooden floor. So expect more reverb that should be allowed, lots of unnecessary noise and enough aliasing that’ll surely get the attention of any cats within a 100 metre radius. 

Released with a brand new audio demo whilst staying to its Trance roots and tested in Reaper and Cubase - surprisingly all sounds in FXB/FXP format and via the V-Station .mid patch loader worked right out of the box on the re-release version of V-Station!

-- Martyn, Owner of SOUND7.